First Night
by Illoria
Summary: The first night aboard the Interceptor on the way to Tortuga, Will thinks about the situation and worries about Elizabeth and contemplates the mad pirate strung up in a hammock on the opposite side of the captain's cabin.


First Night 

**By Illoria**

A/N: *hugs potc dvd, dances with potc dvd, gets down on one knee and proposes to potc dvd* :D Look - I'm back. :) And the DVD has given me major inspiration for Pirates fanfiction. (Hopefully the same will be said for the other PotC authors… I used to come check and every couple of days there would be an updated story… but now it takes weeks at the best… :\) But anyway. I absolutely adore and could be obsessed with the deleted scene – "The Immortal Captain Jack". I absolutely love it. And just the thought of that scene makes me rampant with fanfic inspiration. :D Anyway. :)

Will can't sleep.

As he lays awake in the bed in the captain's cabin on the _Interceptor_, there are many things keeping him awake; some so magnified and huge that he's actually a bit surprised that there is still room for the other, small things that are scuttling about inside of him. It's a surprise, even, that there's room for surprise at all, now.

There used to be surprise. A huge surprise that went off like a bang but that lasted a very tiny – pretty much infinitesimal – moment; after all, wouldn't _you_ be surprised if youwoke up to find that the one you've loved since you were a child had been kidnapped by pirates and was, to your horror and disbelief, currently who-knows-where… (and this thought gives Will a terrible chill every time) being subjected to who-knows-what…?

But, quicker than lightning in a summer storm – like the one only a week ago, which seems so far away now, because surely nothing as normal as a tropical thunderstorm could take place in this new, upside-down and pitch-black world – that surprise was swallowed up in a great hole, a hole that led to the same who-knows-where that Elizabeth had been taken.

And now Will is lying awake in the captain's cabin of a stolen – _stolen! – _Navy ship. And on the other side of the cabin is a pirate – a _pirate! – _who very well might be completely mad, strung up in a hammock and swinging all the time back and forth, back and forth, as the ship (the _stolen_ ship) rocks in the waves, the waves that are always changing out on the open sea.

Will hasn't seen this open sea for eight years – and he got seasick that time, too. He's ashamed that there's even room for something as inconsequential as seasickness amongst the huge hole swallowing up his insides. No, in a world where Miss Swann has been kidnapped by pirates, there is no room for seasickness – just like there is no room for thunderstorms, and surely no room at all for this vast and turning sea that Will has found himself right smack in the middle of.

The sea is too big, Will thinks, now. It's too big because it's keeping him away from Elizabeth, on this mad chase… For a moment his mind flashes back ten years, to a time spent standing on the English shore, wondering how big the ocean really was, and if his father had gotten lost out there, and that was why he never came home…

Will shakes his head into the pillow, in the dark. The _Interceptor _creaks in response to the sound of the crashing waves upon her sides, and Will thinks for but a moment that it's almost as if the two, ship and sea, are speaking some sort of a language to each other. He glances over at Jack and thinks that the pirate probably knows this foreign language, and that he shows it in the way he saunters round like he's walking on top of the waves themselves.

Jack has the tip of his tricorn down over his eyes, and his hands are folded over his stomach, and for all the world he seems content being rocked so much back and forth by the waves beneath.

Just watching the rocking of Jack's hammock to the rhythm of the waves is making Will feel seasick again, so he turns away and stares blankly at the side of the cabin opposite from the large windows with the moonlight shafting through and highlighting certain things like a desk… Soon the waves are rocking the ship in another direction still, and a rolled-up piece of parchment slides off of the desk and keeps rolling back and forth on the cabin floor.

Will shuts his eyes.

He knows, though, that it's not just the turning of the sea and the rocking of the ship that are making him feel sick. It's the prospect of what is happening to Elizabeth now; what he dreads with so much of him that just the thought of any harm ever befalling Miss Swann is enough to send him into a nauseatingly dizzy frenzy.

Will breathes hard, laying on his back now and looking up at the cabin ceiling. This night seems like it is lasting forever, in his heart – and he fears that he'll never get through it and never be able to rescue Elizabeth.

Almost unwillingly, he glances over at Jack in his hammock again. When night was starting to fall, Jack had ushered Will into the captain's cabin and made a big sweeping sort of gesture to the large bed and said, _It's yours for the night_, and before Will could say anything, Jack had disappeared from the cabin, only to return not long after holding an old- and dirty-looking hammock, and without a word to Will he'd strung it up there in front of the cabin's windows, where the moonlight was starting to come inside.

Will had shaken his head and vowed never to ask Jack Sparrow of his motives for doing anything, because Will was sure that none of these motives would ever make much sense at all.

Elizabeth… 

Memories loom over him in the dark, like being twelve and sputtering water and gasping holding onto Elizabeth, only to faint again. And then, later, he woke up, in a foreign place, with the distinct feeling of being pitched back and forth and with a rumbling in his ears – and before he'd even really realized that he was aboard some ship he didn't know, he remembered the girl, and he'd thought that he must've been delusional when he saw her.

Maybe – Will thinks – maybe he is delusional now. Maybe he got thwapped over the head with something heavy and metal in the smithy and as a result, he was positively delusional. And when he got back to normal, however long that would take – he could wonder and be nervous about perhaps telling Miss Swann that he'd had a horrible hallucination involving her being kidnapped and himself engaging in acts of piracy with a crazy man who was named after a bird, all just to rescue her. And she would laugh, and her laugh would sound like bells to him, but he would never tell her that.

_No. _He's not delusional. He knows by the huge feeling inside of him that this is real. He knows by the love and the fury and the have-to and the urgency and the worry, all turning and breaking and rolling him around, just like the waves are doing to the _Interceptor_. In this moment, Will almost feels bad for the ship, having to deal with all these things constantly. He's only had little more than a day of it, and already he thinks that he won't be able to stand it for much longer.

He glances over at Jack again. It's become involuntary now; that whenever Will starts thinking again about the ship and the sea, he glances over at the mad pirate lurching about in his hammock. One day with Jack Sparrow and Will already knows that the pirate's crazy like the sea – the sea with all the haphazardness that somehow turns out to form rhythm, and with all the lurching and churning that somehow turns out to be fluent – how could such things not be positively _mad_?

Will wonders if Elizabeth is thinking about the sea right now, wherever she is – and again, that chill running all through him in spite of the heat of a Caribbean summer night. He wonders if she is thinking about how fast the pirate ship has crossed the wide, open sea, taking her so very far away from all hope of rescue…

Will swallows hard and feels his eyes starting to sting with saltwater, and he wonders if, by the time he finds (or doesn't find, says the same place from whence came that chill) Elizabeth, he will have cried out the entire ocean and there will be nothing left for all that haphazard rhythm at all, and maybe then the world would just dry up using all the world's water in their tears for Elizabeth…

He's finding it hard to breathe now, and he has to take a few gulps of air, and then he just lays in the bed, quiet and alone and thinking that Elizabeth absolutely must be safe, now, and that she must be aboard a pirate ship thinking how slow that pirate ship actually is, and hoping that she isn't too far away at all for rescue.

Will's glance darts over again as he hears the creaking of the hammock as Jack stirs, and Will watches as the pirate, awake now, re-adjusts himself in the hammock and settles down again in what looks like exactly the same position he started in.

Will is just starting to drift off into his own thoughts again, when he hears a faint mumble coming from the hammock strung up on the other side of the cabin, and he listens as Jack says something unintelligible, with only a single word at the end that Will can understand:

"Pearl…" 

Will knows that Jack is still awake – not just talking in his sleep. And he wonders for a split second if the pirate always talks to himself in the middle of the night, and he thinks it not unlikely or even slightly uncharacteristic of Jack Sparrow at all.

The hammock creaks again and Jack re-adjusts himself again, seeming like he can't get comfortable in the hammock even though he always ends up in the same position in which he started. Finally Jack folds his hands back on top of his stomach and pulls his hat down further over his face, and he doesn't mumble this time, but says, just clear as day, a single word again:

"Pearl."

And then the pirate is silent, and Will guesses after a little while that he's gone back to sleep, lurching back and forth just same as before in the hammock. And Will lays awake in the bed, listening to the roar of the sea, that seems now to him, in this upside-down world, like the deep-throated growls of monsters going into battle…

A chill and a tear, and Will still can't sleep.


End file.
